To be honest, I don't really think I am very lovable. I have been a dork my whole life. I was the genius kid that skipped 2 grades and people laughed at. My Dad was a generally loving father who would suddenly whip me until I had bruises and welts if I failed to do what I was supposed to do (99% of the time because I actually forgot!). So I kept my nose in my books and got my "love" by getting straight A's. I always wanted to be lovable, but I just can't seem to get it right.
OK - now we are getting somewhere. That's where you start.
(((((Tina))))) - you are me!!!!! Well ... I'm not a genius, but the rest ... yeah ....
Gorgeous girl, you now have the really hard work to do of healing that little girl inside of you who was terrified of your father’s abuse. (I know you just blinked then and said to yourself – oh, it wasn’t abuse, he loved me, he just didn’t know how else to manage me – but he did abuse you. HE was an abusive man and he damaged you.) You have to, with the help of a good therapist who you trust, heal that little girl who wasn’t safe and never learned to love herself.
You are making the same excuses for the men in your life that you are making for your father. Worse than that, you are finding these men and thinking that if you love them enough, they’ll love you and then you’ll be OK. It won’t happen that way girlfriend.
This is really complex stuff. The little girl in you is in horrible pain – and you are repeating the patterns over and over again in an attempt to fill up that emptiness inside of you where the love-of-self lives.
I suspect you also live in your masculine energy for most of the time – masculine energy is outward energy. It’s the achievement, the providing for your family, the initiative, the drive. Feminine energy is the soft receiving love that women can draw on to strengthen themselves when everything else goes to sh!t. Women like us have had to over compensate with our masculine, achieving energy – because when we look inside of us, it’s empty, there’s nothing there (and that’s terrifying). We’ve been so busy achieving and providing and doing (because we were taught that’s what you have to do to be loved) … that we haven’t learned to love ourselves.
The good news is, when you get it, you can fix it. The most difficult part of this journey for me was accepting that me, super achiever extrodiannaire – always ahead of my peers – always young for my cohort - was actually significantly less emotionally mature than most other women my age.
This isn’t about your husband Tina. This is about you. You’ve made some big steps here in the past couple of days … how are you feeling?
Now we're talking. You can't deal with anyone else's demons. You have to deal with your own, and it sounds as if you have made that first step. Once you understand yourself better, you'll be better prepared to deal with the problems you face in your marriage. Win, lose or draw in that respect. Look forward to hearing from you.
Yeah, I was in therapy for a year when I was near the end of my first marriage (20 years), trying to work up the courage to leave. I'm aware of my demons...I guess they are still haunting me.
I know I enabled my first husband, and did too much and gave too much...basically did the same thing in my first marriage until my hubby finally just laid on the couch and drank for 3 years.
I guess with this marriage, I thought I had married the "right" guy, and that I should be able to freely be generous and fully dedicated and serving. I never expected to be back in the same place.
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I'm a little bit like you but don't see it the same way.
At the beginning of our relationship, we shared responsabilities but as the years went by, situation change. He got a job away from home and came back on week-ends only so i had to take on a little more. Then, if i wanted to have some quality time with him, i would make sure that everything was taking care of so that he could relax on his days off and we could be together. After many years, EVERYTHING BECAME EXPECTED of me but became to much for me to handle on my own.( 4 kids ) I started complaining to him and instead of stepping to the plate,he left me and became extremely emotionally abusive. Don't get me wrong, i know his triggers.( It's MLC no doubt ) He also had way to much on his plate but kept me in the dark. I got lucky and discovered everything in the first few weeks of his MLC witch helped me understand what was going on. I knew it had nothing to do with us. In my eyes, our little R problems were normal and easely fixable.Nothing worth leaving his family for. Exspecially at the age our kids were at the time.
Can you give us some back ground info on why did your H's first M break up and why did yours?
Do you have any info about your H's childhood.
Don't mean to seem 'nosy' but we can gain a lot of insight from the info you share.
I was married at almost 18, in my second year of college. We were married 20 years. I was dating a guy who over the course of several months gradually got me to have sex with him, first by giving me an engagement ring, and when that didn't work, by threatening to leave me. I started seeing his true colors after that, but unfortunately, I was raised Southern Baptist and literally believed I was ruined for life and HAD to marry him. Because I was so ashamed of losing my virginity, I couldn't talk to anyone about it. I know now if I had had the courage to tell my big sister (who raised me) she would have said "OH NO YOU DON'T HAVE TO MARRY THAT MAN!" But I was too ashamed of myself.
Of course I tried to be a perfect little wife and of course he lost interest in me in bed before we were through our first year. Of course I handled this the way a typical insecure 18 year old would do...by begging and crying myself to sleep every night.
He wasn't actually a Christian, that had been a put on when we first started dating, and our values were very different. He cursed a lot, yelled at things and had a volatile temperament. Although he didn't get AS verbally abusive as my current hubby when he lost it. But he was very high strung and would blow off all the time. This unnerved me. But he always promised things would be better when we finished college (we were both working and going to school at night).
We were almost through college when I found out I was pregnant with our first child. I went full-time the last two semesters of college, while working 50 hours a week and the baby was born the day before I graduated with my bachelors. We were married 7 years at this point.
But we were through with college...so everything would be better, right?
Well, you know that answer. The rest of the marriage was a series of "things will be better when's". I always tried to make it work "for the kids", although we slept in separate rooms for over a decade. Lying in bed next to a cold man was too painful. Around year 15 he quit his job of 20 years to start his own business. But never got it off the ground. Gradually began to do less and less. Porn addiction got out of control. He raided our meager savings repeatedly to buy hookers.
I got into therapy, realized a lot of the reason I stayed in this marriage was the abandonment issues I suffered in childhood. Besides my dad's expectations of perfection and the beatings, my mother had whipped me with a belt from age 2 for wetting the bed, or would slap me in the face when she was mad at dad. Once when I was 4 she gave me a terrible nosebleed before preschool when she hit me. I remember the blood falling in big drops on the white melamine floor. The crazy things we remember. She left when I was 7. All of my memories of living with mom are bad. I am sad sometimes not just because of the bad memories, but that I remember so little from my early life with her. I know there were happy times. I've seen the photos.
Anyway, I finally gave up hope on my first marriage and left in year 19. We were divorced a year later.
In full disclosure, part of the reason I left is because I MYSELF got caught up in affairs several times. My husband had two temperatures...cold and indifferent, or screaming. There was no affection. He never kissed me or hugged me for no reason. About once a quarter, he would decide he wanted to have sex. I was so lonely, and so hurt from both my marriage and my "baggage", that I was easy prey for other men. That was no excuse for what I did. It was sin and the Lord convicted me for it. I had to make up my mind to stay in the marriage and be faithful, or to go on. I could not live in adultery and live in my faith. So the last three years we were married I was very careful to avoid other men on my job.
I finally left because I knew I could never be "the real me", and live under those conditions. I just wasn't strong enough to endure it.
I know I also can't be "the real me" under the conditions my current husband has me under, and he's going to have to make real changes if we are going to save our marriage. I ditched a 20-year effort when it was clear it was futile. I know I can do it again if I have to. But it is a last resort for me. I still pray God can save our marriage.
H50 W44 M 4 D 29 D 28 D 26 S 22 S 20 D 17 S 15 S 5 D 3 1st Bomb 4/2009 Separated 2/2009 4 months 2nd Bomb 6/11 Separated 7/11 to ???
I'm a little bit like you but don't see it the same way.
At the beginning of our relationship, we shared responsabilities but as the years went by, situation change. He got a job away from home and came back on week-ends only so i had to take on a little more. Then, if i wanted to have some quality time with him, i would make sure that everything was taking care of so that he could relax on his days off and we could be together. After many years, EVERYTHING BECAME EXPECTED of me but became to much for me to handle on my own.( 4 kids ) I started complaining to him and instead of stepping to the plate,he left me and became extremely emotionally abusive. Don't get me wrong, i know his triggers.( It's MLC no doubt ) He also had way to much on his plate but kept me in the dark. I got lucky and discovered everything in the first few weeks of his MLC witch helped me understand what was going on. I knew it had nothing to do with us. In my eyes, our little R problems were normal and easely fixable.Nothing worth leaving his family for. Exspecially at the age our kids were at the time.
You are probably enduring a "normal" MLC. Which is awful and makes no sense and he may not recover from (hopefully he will). Mine has a little more hair on it.
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Tina, what i have posted was my view of the situation. My XH's is totally different. Don't forget that we are the evil one in this through their eyes. We are to blame for their life failure, we are to blame and they want us to pay,pay,PAY. Fog is really thick in their head. I heard and believed all of his accusations for a long time to the point of been hospitalised not once but twice for panic attacks. I had to take a good look at all of this and realized that ALOT of those accusations were totally made-up. I was percieved as someone i'm not. I had told him once that i wasn't surprised he didn't love me anymore because he couldn't even remember who i was. Deep down in his soul, he knows the real me but through his cycling, i get burried in the fog. I resurface here and there but until i'm in clear view all the time, all i get is hope, confusion and hurt. MLC is bad for everyone. No one has it easier than others, just different. A midlife transition is easier than a MLC but still is very painful for everyone involved. Changes has to occur and every facets of your life is analized inside and out. Time, time and more time but for now, PROTECT YOURSELF AND YOUR FAMILY. IT'S IMPERATIVE. He his already full of anger, he is irrational and unpredictable. TAKE CARE OF YOU, BE STRONG, PROTECT YOURSELF!
Hey exquisite, I feel your pain. I too had panic attacks and had to get some high blood pressure medication not because I have high blood pressure, but because I was having horrible "spikes" under stress that could cause a heart attack.
My hubby has continuously blamed me for everything he is going through, which really hurt because a lot of the things he has said or accused me of, EVEN IF I AM BEING BRUTALLY HONEST WITH MYSELF AND MY FAULTS, are COMPLETELY false! It is like he is talking to someone else that is not even in the room!
He also does a lot of really wild PROJECTING! This is where they blast you for some error, weakness or sin that THEY are doing and you are definitely NOT!
I often feel like he doesn't love me, even though he says he still does, because in these crazy rants it is like he doesn't even see me! How can he love me if he doesn't even know who I am?
Thank you for your advice. I am walking a tightrope, because even though I hope God can save our marriage, I do have to get the weight of all my H's condemnation off me. For a long time, I was sucking it in...buying into, "oh if I just do better and try harder he will be happy". I am gradually peeling that junk off of me. At the same time, I do hope we can save our marriage, but this separation (even though it has only been two weeks so far) is opening my eyes to the fact that all this fear I live under is KILLING ME and if we are going to restore our marriage, we literally can't do it without "divorcing the first marriage, and moving forward into a totally new one". We have to make real changes. Even in the midst of his MLC.
I can't live with him like he's been. He has gone way too far. If he has to keep acting out to this degree, he just can't live with us. I hate to say that, but it is true.
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I'm glad to see that you realize that it's not all on your shoulders. You are doing great. We have to look deep into our core and see wich value we live by. what we want people to remember us by when we pass by. Been giving and generous is not a bad thing. But it has to go both ways in any situation. I can tell that you are a great person and i will be reading up on your journey often.
